


between love everlasting and meaningless rhyme

by nameless_bliss



Category: Schitt's Creek
Genre: Canon Compliant, Coda, Early Relationship, Episode: s04e02 Pregnancy Test, Fluff, Fluff without Plot, Introspection, M/M, POV Patrick Brewer, Patrick Brewer Deserves Nice Things, Present Tense, Queer Feelings, Sleeping Together, brief references to sexual content, mentions of past Patrick/Rachel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-29
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-14 17:54:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29050236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nameless_bliss/pseuds/nameless_bliss
Summary: Patrick loves waking up. It’s the absolute worst a person can possibly be, and it’s unavoidable. Bad breath and ruined hair and rumpled clothes and goop-crusted eyes and maybe some morning wood, just to kill that last shred of dignity. It’s messy, and it feels ugly, and Patrick loves it. Helovesit. He loves getting to feel gross, imperfect in a way that can’t be helped. He loves being trusted with the vulnerability of getting to see it, being given the worst, the most artless a person can be. Patrick has always known that there’s nothing more beautiful than watching someone sleep next to him, nothing better than the feeling of waking up with them in the morning.He is so,sounprepared for the feeling of waking up next to David Rose.
Relationships: Patrick Brewer/David Rose
Comments: 36
Kudos: 329





	between love everlasting and meaningless rhyme

Patrick has always loved sharing a bed. He loved it when he was a kid, crammed into one guest room with three of his cousins at their Nana’s house, wrestling for mattress space and the one good pillow, staying up too late watching _A Night in Casablanca_ over and over because all the other VHS tapes were too worn out. He loved sleepovers at his friend Aaron’s house, because they’d set up a big air mattress in the den instead of using sleeping bags like everyone else. Most of all, he loved the thin, insufficient futon mattress on the floor of the partially-finished basement at Rachel’s house. He loved sharing it when they were in junior high, when they’d eat popcorn and laugh until they fell asleep with tears on their faces. He loved sharing it in high school, pressed together, breathing heavily and repeating their plan to wait until college in strained whispers. 

Sleep was always his favorite part of it, with her. No matter what else there was, no matter how awkward or uncertain he felt during… whatever came before, Patrick could always look forward to sleeping next to Rachel. Even during the ugliest of it, they always came back together to sleep. Patrick would exile himself to the couch after a fight, and Rachel would be there before morning, tucked between his body and the cushions. They would break up, and Patrick would knock on her door at 2 a.m., and she would let him back into her bed, both of them grateful to be able to really _sleep_ for the first time in weeks.

It’s never seemed unusual to him. He’s learned from a handful of other girls that not everyone loves the literal act of sleeping together, but to Patrick, it’s so simple. He doesn’t understand how anyone could not understand it. Weight on the mattress. Heat under the covers. The sound of breathing, maybe the white noise of snoring. The feeling of someone next to him, the simple signs of living being shared, breath and heat and a heartbeat. He loves the freedom of it, the total lack of pretense. No decisions, no mistakes, just a complete surrender of control. It should be terrifying, but when someone is next to him, it’s easy. It’s something to share.

Patrick loves waking up. It’s the absolute worst a person can possibly be, and it’s unavoidable. Bad breath and ruined hair and rumpled clothes and goop-crusted eyes and maybe some morning wood, just to kill that last shred of dignity. It’s messy, and it feels ugly, and Patrick loves it. He _loves_ it. He loves getting to feel gross, imperfect in a way that can’t be helped. He loves being trusted with the vulnerability of getting to see it, being given the worst, the most artless a person can be. Patrick has always known that there’s nothing more beautiful than watching someone sleep next to him, nothing better than the feeling of waking up with them in the morning.

He is so, _so_ unprepared for the feeling of waking up next to David Rose.

At first, he considers going back to sleep, clinging to the thread of a pleasant dream that he’s forgetting even as he’s still in it—maybe something about a heist? In a thrift store? But he can hear birds out the window and there’s some light behind his eyes, so. It’s morning. And of course, once he registers that, he’s wide awake. He blinks over at his clock— 

Not his clock.

He blinks again.

Stevie’s clock.

Right. Stevie’s apartment. Stevie’s bed. A night at Stevie’s, with— 

Patrick presses his face into the pillow, and he grins. 

That explains the heavy, bone-deep exhaustion, and the residual ache in his hips, and the ghost of friction burn around his mouth.

He slept with David. He slept with him, and he _slept with_ him, and the literal and the euphemism are both so amazing that he’s not sure which one makes him giddier. He buries his face further into the pillow, tenses every muscle in his body, and fights the urge to fucking _scream_ out some of this happiness that’s clogging up his chest. 

And when he thinks he can bear it, he untucks his face and peeks over at David.

He’s sprawled, somehow on both his back and his side. His legs are curled up. One arm is across his chest, the other is bent, hand resting on the pillow by his mouth. For all the joke-threats he made about being a blanket hog, he’s kicked them off at some point—or tried to, and gotten them tangled in his legs. His mouth is slack. His breathing is loud. There are little crusties in the corners of his closed eyes, a bit of dried drool on his chin. His hair is… interesting. There are pillow lines on the side of his face. His shirt has twisted around his torso, riding up his stomach, showing a tease of the hair that disappears into the waistband of his pants. He breathes a little louder, snuffling, opening and closing his mouth, before sighing back into a slower rhythm. 

He’s a total mess. And not a cute, romcom ‘mess’ that’s just a self-deprecating joke about some mild flaws. He’s a _mess,_ and there’s nothing cute about it, and it’s the cutest thing Patrick has ever seen. He’s so beautiful it knocks the air clean out of Patrick’s lungs. 

He thought he was prepared, because he knew to expect it. He’s always loved waking up with someone, anyone, so he thought he knew what he was getting into. But he’d forgotten that David isn’t ‘anyone’, he’s David. He’s beautiful, but not by accident. He’s maintained. Curated. He’s complicated sweaters and expensive skin products and a whole routine just to get his hair into that shape, and he’s proud of all of it—and he should be. He works for it. It takes work to be David Rose. 

And right now, that’s all gone. It’s stuffed into the overnight bag at the foot of Stevie’s bed. David is stripped bare. His pajamas may be designer, but they still twist and wrinkle as he sleeps. There are four dents on his fingers, four rings sitting patiently on the nightstand. His perfectly cared-for skin has been creased by Stevie’s clearance rack pillowcases. He doesn’t have any of it. He’s naked.

And he’s letting Patrick see it. He let Patrick fall asleep wrapped around him. He let Patrick stay, and see him. 

It’s brave. And maybe it’s a kind of fairness, too. A trade-off. Last night was… a lot. Patrick wanted it—he wanted every goddamn second of it more than he’s ever wanted anything in his life—but, even so. It was a lot, for him.

Sex doesn’t come easy to Patrick. It’s not some sort of primal instinct, something in his body that can take over and do all the thinking for him. He thought it would be different with David. And it was, to an extent. Turns out, having sex with someone you want to have sex with makes it better. Who knew? But it didn’t fix everything. The want didn’t make the reality any easier. It’s always felt like there are all these rules to sex, a list of protocols and instructions that everyone else just knows, without having to be told, and no one’s ever thought to share them with Patrick. And it’s not like having a completely new kind of sex was gonna make him feel _more_ prepared. He still had all the worry, the performance anxiety, the hatred of how stupid his voice sounds, how un-sexy his sex is, the prickling fear that there’s something he doesn’t know, something he’s doing wrong. The only difference was that this time, he had all of it with David. 

But he did it. It was the best sex of his life, and hopefully not the worst of David’s, and it was… kind of brave. Patrick felt brave, letting himself have that. He knew it wouldn’t be perfect, and it wasn’t, and he let himself have it anyway.

And now David is letting him have this. Sex is easy for David. Sleep is easy for Patrick. So together, they get through the night. There’s something kinda pretty about that. Poetry.

Patrick rubs his feet together. There’s that alarm clock inside him telling him that it’s go-time: get up, get dressed, make tea, go watch the sunrise, don’t waste this quiet, perfect time. But that argument is a lot harder to make right now. It’s pretty easy to fight the impulse to go hike out some of his feelings about David Rose when David Rose is snoring next to him. He doesn’t need brisk air and exercise to tamp down the mortifying horniness that’s been plaguing him for weeks, not now that he truly understands what it means to be ‘fucked out’, to wake up after a night of multiple orgasms—the _first_ night of multiple orgasms in his entire damn life.

No, for now, the itch under his skin telling him to get up get moving get something done is quiet, just as exhausted as the rest of him. Anything else feels trivial in comparison to this. Anything else would be a waste. Right now, he lies in someone else’s bed, and he watches David sleep, and he’s worn out, and he feels like a mess, and he… he feels good.

Patrick blinks, watching the start of a sunrise filter in through the curtains. For a moment, everything seems to still, settling into a snapshot. A slow, warm wave of understanding, of feeling… this. It slots into place.

That’s been happening to him a lot, lately. Things keep shifting. He’d thought it would all happen at once, that saying ‘Plot Twist: I’m Gay’ would flick a switch in his brain that took care of all the changes in one go. A factory reset that would undo all the settings he’s meddled with his whole life trying to make it work. But it’s not like that. He still finds things tucked away, things he has to adjust, things that feel new. The split-second where he remembers that he tilts his face _up_ into kisses. The feeling of holding a hand that’s as big as his own. Little things he still needs to get used to, little moments where his body goes ‘Oh, right’. Some things are bigger, more of a paradigm shift than a minor adjustment (say, for instance, the experience of having sex with someone he’s sexually attracted to). But somehow, it’s the little things that surprise him the most. Little reminders that this is different, and better, and it… 

He always used to feel like there was something missing. He’d have all these little pieces of love and relationships that he _knew_ he liked, and he’d try to take them into himself, and they never fit. There were empty spaces left over, nooks and crannies where he knew there shouldn’t be. He spent so many years stuffing in more and more and more but no matter how hard he tried, the spaces never filled. 

But as it turns out, it wasn’t about the size. It was the shape. It was him. He’d made the space in himself under an assumption, and thirty years later he figured out he’d been wrong. He loves relationships. He loves the minutiae of romance and partnership and all the pieces that come together to create it. But try as he may, he could never assemble the pieces into the right thing, because he didn’t know what the right thing was. 

He knows now. He’s rebuilt himself, redesigning all that space inside him with the advantage of finally having the goddamn blueprints. 

So now, the pieces fit. Finally, it all fits. He finds these same pieces he’s always known, but now, he slots them into a space that’s perfectly made. Everything settles in exactly where it’s supposed to be. And that makes it all feel so much better. He gets to go through all the motions he’s always loved so much, but this time, he _gets_ them. It fits. He fits. 

He’s always loved the feeling of waking up next to someone, but he’s never felt it like this. He’s never felt it slot into place, one piece of a bigger, more beautiful thing. 

He thinks this should be too much, more than he’s capable of feeling, more than he can hold. But really, it’s not. It’s the right amount. This is the exact amount he’s supposed to feel. He’s just never had it before.

And the thing that’s really messing him up is that this isn’t even all of it. It’s already too good, feeling all of these familiar pieces the way he’s supposed to, finally, _finally,_ and somehow there’s still more. Every new thing he gets to have with David, it’ll be like this, it’ll be good, it’ll be right, for the first time. It’s only been a couple weeks, and logically Patrick knows this is putting the cart _way_ before the horse, but he can’t help it. He wants all of it. He wants everything because he knows it’ll be good, he knows it’ll be better than he’s ever known. 

And he could have it. If David lets him, Patrick knows he absolutely could.

He wants to. God, he wants to fall in love with David Rose. He knows he can love this man so deeply, so well, if he gets the chance. 

Patrick reaches out, because even though doesn’t want to wake David up, he can’t _not_ be touching him anymore. He needs something, just a little brush through his hair, or a tug on his sleeve, _something,_ he needs— 

An alarm blares, and Patrick has a goddamn heart attack.

David makes an ugly noise. He keeps his eyes closed as he flails toward the nightstand, haphazardly smacking his fingers against his phone screen once he finds it.

“David! What the _hell_ —” 

David mumbles something incoherent, rolling over and squinting blearily at his phone until he finally shuts off the deafening sound. He tosses the phone back (it misses the nightstand entirely). With much effort, he rolls over to Patrick. “Sex.”

“Sorry?”

“Morning sex.” David paws at Patrick’s shoulders, pulling him close, going in blind for a kiss. He misses his target with complete confidence, and his parted lips land on Patrick’s nose. He hums mildly as he course-corrects down to his mouth. 

“David,” Patrick says into the surprisingly deep, indecently wet kiss. He twists away from the onslaught, letting David mouth at his jaw instead. “It’s 5:30.”

“Wanna take my time.”

Patrick huffs out a laugh. “Pretty sure I provided ample evidence last night that you won’t need two and a half hours to get me off. If you tried to make me last that long, it’d probably kill me.”

David moans affirmatively against Patrick’s neck. He worms a hand between them, and—apparently not interested in taking his time after all—he immediately gropes Patrick’s dick through his pajamas.

“Wh—hey—” Patrick grabs David’s wrist, and, okay, it’s not like he hasn’t been half-hard since he woke up (hell, he doesn’t think he’s been fully soft for even a moment since he got into this bed), and there’s a _noticeable_ bulge being pressed against his hip, and sex with David has recently become his new favorite hobby, but… 

Patrick gently pulls David’s hand away from his crotch. “You need sleep. If you wake up this early, you’re gonna be miserable later.”

“Don’t care.”

“Yeah, I don’t give a shit whether _you_ care; _I’m_ the one who has to put up with you all day!” He tugs David’s hand up between their chests, trying to coax them into something a little more platonic, and plants a kiss on David’s forehead. “Go back to sleep.” 

“But _sex,_ though,” David whines.

Patrick lets himself grin—only because David still hasn’t opened his eyes to see it. “Tell you what: you go back to sleep, and in a little while, I promise I’ll wake you up _nicely_. Sound good?”

David makes an adorably sleepy attempt at a sexy noise. He shimmies his shoulders, but it just wiggles him down the bed. He tucks his head under Patrick’s chin. “How nice?”

“ _Very_ nice, David.”

David moans, pressing his slack mouth to Patrick’s throat. “Fine, that’ll… it be, to… there…” he keeps muttering, wordless, quiet, and eventually… 

He falls asleep. 

Patrick ducks his head, pressing his smile into David’s wildly messy hair. His feet are twisted in the blanket at an awkward angle, and one of his arms is pinned under David’s shoulder and will be asleep within minutes, and if there’s gonna be sex then he really needs to get up to pee and brush his teeth, and he should probably worry about whether he just signed himself up for his first blowjob and whether he’s ready for that (you can wake someone up with a handjob, right? A blowjob is the stereotype, but it doesn’t _have_ to be a blowjob… right?), and the logistics of this situation aren’t spectacular. If he’s settling in for another, what, hour? Hour and a half? He’s gonna need to make some adjustments. 

Later, though. He can deal with the finicky details later. He has time. This, now, feels good. He feels good. From the shallowest touch, all the way into his bones, he feels good. And it’s thoroughly uncomplicated. It’s the most simple, most complete feeling he’s ever had. He feels good, and it’s easy to feel this way. He feels good, and the feeling of it feels right.

Patrick thinks he could get used to this.

**Author's Note:**

> Started trying to write something else, had feelings about Patrick Brewer, bon apetit. 💜
> 
> Title taken from "Very First Time" by John Fullbright.
> 
> As always, thank you so much for reading! I'd always love to hear from you, either here or over on my [tumblr](https://my-nameless-bliss.tumblr.com/post/641603811047358464)! Wash your hands, check in with someone you love, and take care of yourselves!


End file.
